The irony is that they went full Nazi to censor Nazis, and at the end of the blog post, realise that they went full Nazi.

In the blog post, Matthew sides with “due process” over “free speech”:

Freedom of Speech < Due Process

The issue of who can and cannot be online has often been associated with Freedom of Speech. We think the more important principle is Due Process. I, personally, believe in strong Freedom of Speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally. On the other hand, the concept of Due Process is close to universal. At its most basic, Due Process means that you should be able to know the rules a system will follow if you participate in that system.

Due Process requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary. It’s why we’ve always said that our policy is to follow the guidance of the law in the jurisdictions in which we operate. Law enforcement, legislators, and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted. Companies should not.

This is entirely misguided. You can’t have due process if speech is muzzled. This should be obvious enough.

He also weighs in with some moral arguments:

You, like me, may believe that the Daily Stormer’s site is vile. You may believe it should be restricted. You may think the authors of the site should be prosecuted. Reasonable people can and do believe all those things. But having the mechanism of content control be vigilante hackers launching DDoS attacks subverts any rational concept of justice.

I think those are worth breaking down a bit more.

You, like me, may believe that the Daily Stormer’s site is vile.

That’s a personal opinion, but yes, I also find them vile.

You may believe it should be restricted.

Absolutely not. While I may find DS vile, I’m not willing to denigrate free speech to only speech that I don’t find vile. The only speech that may rightfully be restricted is that speech which is criminal in nature, such as incitement to violence, etc. This has been covered in literature extensively.

You may think the authors of the site should be prosecuted.

No. I don’t. It shouldn’t be a crime to be an asshole fucking loudmouth. There are many things that I find personally repulsive that I don’t think should be prosecuted. My opinion shouldn’t dictate how other people live their lives. Even if I find it abhorrent. (The exception being criminal behaviour, and again, this has been covered many times, so I won’t repeat it here.)

Reasonable people can and do believe all those things.

No. Reasonable people don’t believe all those things. You just went full fucking Nazi on actual Nazis and you’re trying to justify your horrific behaviour.

But having the mechanism of content control be vigilante hackers launching DDoS attacks subverts any rational concept of justice.

This is true. I have no dispute there. Due process needs to be followed, and in order for that to happen, people must be free to speak.

Then at the end of the post, Matthew seems to flip around somewhat, and realise that he and Cloudflare have crossed a very important line.

Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: “Is this the day the Internet dies?” He was half joking, but only half. He’s no fan of the Daily Stormer or sites like it. But he does realize the risks of a company like Cloudflare getting into content policing.

That’s a telling and important bit, and perhaps the most important bit in the blog post.

He was half joking, but only half.

The point of free speech is that we need to tolerate (not accept!) things that we disagree with, and even things that we find horrific.

It’s that difference between tolerance and acceptance that seems to be blurred.

In 2012 Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” You can find it here:

Sure, we could talk about adding in other crimes, such as rape and torture, but at the end of the day, are they really all that much horrific than simply murdering toddlers and babies? I think that in those terms, we start to lose perspective as it’s so far beyond any semblance of morality or decency.

Still, there’s no excuse to censor those authors as far as I can see.

You don’t win against full Nazis by going full Nazi. Let the marketplace of ideas prevail. Most sane people reject Nazism, just as they reject infanticide. We don’t need to censor non-criminal speech.

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If you’re not familiar with the memory hole, it’s when information starts disappearing. It’s happening again (it actually happens pretty often). See this post. If you follow up and check, you will see that the video is starting to disappear.

Whenever information is sensitive, it’s a good idea to download it and preserve a copy in case it is needed at a later date. The censors and tyrants out there love nothing more than controlling information, and the less control we allow them, the better.

I will be uploading the speech from the link above to help ensure that there is no memory hole.

1

REDACTED: My hosting provider has stated that they do not want to host the kind of content to which the US Marshals Service has objected (dox). There is nothing illegal about the content, and they recognise that. However, they are a private company, and they do get to run their business how they wish to.

As such, I have made the original post private and out of reach of the public; it will remain private. However, in the interests of keeping my original point about Ars Technica lying, I am copying a redacted version of the post below.

Nothing in the redacted portions contains any kind of threat. The redacted portions only have information about the judge. All the evidence to show that Ars Technica is wildly exaggerating is available, though not with that 100% degree of transparency that I had originally intended. Since you can verify this for yourself, my point still stands: Ars Technica published demonstrably false information.

The original post is below with redactions to remove the content that was objected to.

The federal judge overseeing the Silk Road case against Ross Ulbricht has been subject to a death threat, and apparently she had her private information exposed on a “Hidden Wiki” website accessible only via Tor-equipped browsers. The same information is available on the open web through at least one website that pulls information from the Tor network.

However, the original wiki article (.onion link) doesn’t support that. Here’s the text of the complete article without formatting or embedded links:

http://freeross.org/ – Please donate to the official legal defense fund of the Ulbricht family.
Who is Judge Katherine Forrest?
Judge Katherine Forrest

Katherine Bolan Forrest is the judge who is unfairly ruining Ross Ulbricht’s life and chance for a fair trail. In case you are unaware of her, she was the Judge who “Rejected Every Defense Argument In The Silk Road Trial” [ Clearnet link! ]

Can Ulbricht really be accused of running a drug-selling conspiracy when he (ALLEGEDLY) merely ran a website that made the narcotics sales possible? And can he be charged with money laundering when bitcoin doesn’t necessarily meet the requisite definition of money?’ According to Forrest’s latest ruling, yes and yes. She rejected every argument made in the defense’s motion, starting with the idea that Ulbricht had merely provided an innocent platform for hosting the Silk Road’s illicit e-commerce, just as eBay might occasionally host illegal content without its knowledge.

Justice is not being served, Ross Ulbricht is a hard working honest man who is now a fall guy that the US government decided to choose because he had a large amount of bitcoins, a currency they are doing everything in their power to make illegal.
Judge Katherine Forrest Dox

Without further ado, fuck this stupid bitch and I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family: http://doxbinzqkeoso6sl.onion/doxviewer.php?dox=Judge_Katherine_Forrest

I can also get information on all of this lady’s relatives and maybe some of her close friends, so expect more releases over doxbin and this wiki. For right now just steal her identity and send her gifts in the mail 😉 Expect phone numbers and relatives SSNs and complete doxes in a future release.

Oh, and maybe someone should attempt a Swat [ Clearnet link! ] just to put this bitch in her place. Just please don’t be an idiot and fall for that “Tor SWATing Service” scam going around. Oh and Katherine, don’t be surprised when you and all your relatives get woken up in the middle of the night by a swat team with assault rifles pointed in your face and helicopters shining search lights into your windows. Or when someone close to you opens up a letter in the mail one day and it happens to contain anthrax 🙂

Just before the dox, this part:

Without further ado, fuck this stupid bitch and I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family: http://doxbinzqkeoso6sl.onion/doxviewer.php?dox=Judge_Katherine_Forrest

Certainly wishes her ill will, but it isn’t a death threat. Or, it’s about as much of a threat as, “I hope you get hit by a bus,” is a threat. i.e. It’s not.

At the bottom, the part about swatting isn’t a death threat, unless she believes that it is the job of SWAT teams to break into houses and murder people. Well, that actually does have some credibility, but no credibility in the legal arena, so I don’t think she could consider that a death threat.

The part about anthrax pertains to people close to her, so it isn’t a death threat against her. But obtaining weapons-grade anthrax is nearly impossible without stealing it from a bio-weapons lab. So, the anthrax wishes aren’t really credible. If it were ricin, that would be entirely credible.

Ars Technica isn’t merely distorting the truth – they are lying. And they even posted a screenshot of the page that anyone can check to see that they are lying.

Here’s a better screenshot. Click for a larger version.

REDACTED

If they wanted to lie about it, they should have left out the screenshot.

The brazen, bold-faced lies coming out of the MSM presstitute dino-media are really just over the top. They make it readily possible to verify that they are lying right in the same article.

Why?

Because 2 + 2 = 5 and 4 and 3 all at the same time in their twisted, Orwellian doublethink world.

UPDATE 1 (2014-11-19): Saturday November 15th Cynic.me was taken offline for this post (see here), but brought online again with this post being password protected. I’ve finally been able to talk to the manager who took the site offline and we’ve agreed to put the post back online until we can talk again after he consults with his legal department. He said will get back to me in a couple days. Cross your fingers for freedom of speech and transparency. Or bury your head in the sand and scream about how censorship and opacity makes us all “safe”…

UPDATE 2 (2014-11-19): I’ve received an email from the manager. It was much quicker than anticipated.

I have had my executives look at the case this afternoon. They have expressed their concerns and would like the content removed from the website. Regardless of whether or not its legal or freedom of speech they do not want to host this kind of material. We ask you that you kindly remove the content from the publicly facing website. Please reply to this case directly if you have questions or concerns and I can follow up with you directly.

As such, this post is now being made private again as I don’t want to be bothered with the hassles of moving web sites, etc.

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With Canada tumbling in a downward spiral into a police state, is it any wonder that students would give thug police a straight arm salute? The reference is obviously to the Nazi police state, and completely lost on some Jewish groups that apparently don’t understand that it happened before, and it can happen again, and it can happen here. (And I’m quite honestly sick of hearing people whine about how offended they are by everything and anything. Why not “always look on the bright side of life” instead of finding reasons to be offended?)

The appearance of so-called Nazi salutes at Quebec student protests was condemned by a Jewish-rights organization that asked people to refrain from using the hurtful gesture.

Some protesters have been using it repeatedly in recent weeks to mock Montreal police at demonstrations in which chanting crowds have referred to local officers as the “SS,” called them fascists and compared them to Nazi police for their alleged brutality.

…

While the gestures are meant as an insult to police — and not as any expression of support for Nazism — B’nai Brith Canada says that’s no excuse.

…

“We condemn, in the strongest of terms, this inexcusable display of hate by Quebec student protesters that has outraged the Jewish community and demonstrated just how low the level of public debate has fallen on the streets of Montreal,” CEO Frank Dimant said in the statement.

Ultimately, this boils down to some people being overly sensitive and in dire need of growing a bit thicker skin.

The Nazi holocaust of the European Jews is very, very far from unique in history. Anyone that would deny that obvious knows almost no history. But more than simply not being unique in history, it was hardly unique in the 20th century even.

Since the term “holocaust” has effectively been hijacked to specifically mean the “holocaust of the European Jews in Nazi Germany,” it’s pretty much a useless word now to mean what it originally meant. Well, perhaps unless you want to have people whining about how they feel insulted because you used a word correctly. The new term to replace “holocaust” is “democide” (source):

The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.

In the 20th century 262,000,000 people fell victim to their own governments (source). In the 20th century, the Nazi regime ranks a distant 4th place behind China, the U.S.S.R., and Colonialism (source):

Is it then shameful to use “Stalin” or “Stalinist” or “Stazi” as a derogatory term? Hardly. I’ve never met a Russian that was remotely thin skinned about anything.

The democide of the Chinese people by Mao isn’t really well known, and as such, those comparisons are really never made, or rare if ever. So there’s not much to say about how that would be offensive, though given what I know from Chinese friends of mine, I rather doubt that they would be offended.

The atrocities inflicted on European Jews, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped people, political dissidents, gypsies, and pretty much anyone else that the Nazis didn’t like, are similarly not unique. They weren’t unique in the 20th century, and they most certainly aren’t unique in history.

Where and when would you guess this picture was taken?

The picture was taken in 1865 in Andersonville, Georgia, USA (source). The man in the picture, a Union soldier, actually survived.

And the list goes on with countless cases of governments murdering their own people.

That B’nai Brith would attempt to censor students in Montreal is abhorrent. I say that because their analogy is pretty solid. It hasn’t come to the mass murder of Canadians, but the signs are clear. The rise of police states or tyrannies follows a fairly uniform path, and Canada is marching down that path just as the Police States of America are. This is hardly surprising though as Ottawa often seems to follow London and Washington D.C. like a lost puppy when it comes to laws, regulations, and foreign policy. Sure, they may not lead the charge to murder people in other countries, but they’re seldom far behind.

New legislation in Quebec has effectively made protesting illegal (source). A demonstration in May was declared illegal after a few Molotov cocktails were thrown (source), which effectively punishes everyone for the acts of a few people. Last time I checked, I wasn’t responsible for what you did, and vice versa. Police brutality is on the rise. One only need look at what is happening in Montreal (source – video). Apparently “safety during protests” now means teargas, batons, mace, running people down with cars, and kidnappings. The police in Canada basically have a license to murder people in cold blood. The video here shows a man crawling on his hands and knees after being shot, only to be shot a couple more times. When do Canadian police stop shooting? When they run out of bullets of course!

Freedom of information is being restricted more in Canada (source), making government less transparent and more secretive.

Bill C-30 in Canada is opening up the doors for Big Brother with utterly insane levels of privacy invasion. You can get a few questions answered about that abomination here.

Making protests illegal.

Legislating a surveillance state that the SS would have been envious of.

Just which of those belongs in a peaceful, respectful, tolerant, and free society? Which of those doesn’t resemble the Nazis?

From the original article:

“The gesture is shocking because we are historians and we know that we’re not in the same historical or political context,” Licop said. “But the problem is that it’s a profound lack of respect to the victims of Nazism and the genocide of Jews during World War Two.”

That the political/historical context isn’t the same is trivial. One time and place is not another time and place. This is not information. It is trivial. However, the fact remains that the same kinds of things that happened in the 1920’s and 30’s are starting to happen in Canada. So yes. The analogy holds.

Again from the article:

Dimant, of B’nai Brith, put it even more bluntly.

“We’re talking about the Montreal police force, we’re not talking about Nazis here,” he said in an interview. “And to try to make any comparison makes a mockery of the Holocaust.”

Which is entirely missing the point. If anything Dimant is making a mockery of those deaths by refusing to allow them to be remembered as a warning for the future. Dimant is effectively imprisoning the memory in the past and condemning it to obscurity by limiting the meaning of those deaths to be purely isolated to that single time and place. How could anyone be more disrespectful of the victims of the most famous democide in history than by refusing to recognize that their deaths could serve as a warning for future generations?

Again from the article:

Audrey Licop, spokeswoman for The Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, says the fascist greeting was used by the Nazis in the 1930s and was mandatory for citizens in Nazi Germany.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs says the decision to use the Hitler salute, in the Montreal protests, is not an act of hatred — just one of ignorance.

“These are clearly not support for Nazism or intended as anti-Semitic displays,” said spokesman David Ouellette.

“It’s much more a function of the ignorance about history and the over-heated rhetoric that has plagued the current crisis in Quebec.”

How is it ignorant to recognize the signs of a rising tyranny and to connect the dots? Again, this is entirely missing the point. Canada is on the path to tyranny, just as the US and many other countries are, and to point that out is very far from disrespecting the victims of the Nazi holocaust. If anything, it is a tribute. Their deaths are not forgotten. The lessons of the past are not forgotten. This is a tribute to them!

The sad fact is, Canada is heading full steam down the path of tyranny. The students protesting in Montreal can see it. B’nai Brith apparently can’t.

What those that condemn the students for effectively amounts to saying, “You’re not remembering the dead the way we want you to remember the dead, so you’re disrespectful and offensive.”

I wonder if anyone finds that offensive?

The holocaust wasn’t unique by any means. It has simply been studied more than other instances of democide. We honour the dead by remembering them, and working to avoid their fates. Certainly, we honour the victims of the Nazi holocaust far more than the other 97% of victims of democide in the 20th century, all 262,000,000 of them. Perhaps we should reflect on the fates of those people as well. They were no less human than you or me.

And in case you’re curious, I’m not Jewish, but my ancestors on both my parents’ sides were targeted for genocide. So don’t tell me about how I don’t understand what it’s like to have my ancestors murdered. I fully understand what it is to have ancestors targeted for extinction. I just don’t dwell on it. And don’t tell me how I don’t understand what it’s like to be discriminated against. I know full well from first hand experience there.